by Alec Karakatsanis
The New Press
10/29/2019, hardcover
SKU: 9781620975275
From an award-winning civil rights lawyer, a profound challenge to our society's normalization of the caging of human beings, and the role of the legal profession in perpetuating it
Alec Karakatsanis is interested in what we choose to punish. For example, it is a crime in most of America for poor people to wager in the streets over dice; dice-wagerers can be seized, searched, have their assets forfeited, and be locked in cages. It's perfectly fine, by contrast, for people to wager over international currencies, mortgages, or the global supply of wheat; wheat-wagerers become names on the wings of hospitals and museums.
He is also troubled by how the legal system works when it is trying to punish people. The bail system, for example, is meant to ensure that people return for court dates. But it has morphed into a way to lock up poor people who have not been convicted of anything. He's so concerned about this that he has personally sued court systems across the country, resulting in literally tens of thousands of people being released from jail when their money bail was found to be unconstitutional.
Karakatsanis doesn't think people who have gone to law school, passed the bar, and sworn to uphold the Constitution should be complicit in the mass caging of human beings--an everyday brutality inflicted disproportionately on the bodies and minds of poor people and people of color and for which the legal system has never offered sufficient justification. Usual Cruelty is a profoundly radical reconsideration of the American "injustice system" by someone who is actively, wildly successfully, challenging it.
Reviews:
"Alec Karakatsanis asks a difficult question: What do we do when defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges, legislators, and our fellow citizens make the most profound of injustices possible? The question is a worthy one. If to be sworn to uphold the law is not enough, to read this book, too, is simply not enough. May action follow." --Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet, lawyer, and author of the poetry collection Felon
"A devastating indictment of the legal profession by one of our most important young lawyers, Usual Cruelty cuts to the core of what is critical to understand about our legal system, and about ourselves. Every law student and lawyer should read this book." --Anthony D. Romero, executive director, ACLU
"Usual Cruelty offers a provocative indictment of the legal profession's role in perpetuating a justice system rife with structural racism and indignity. With compassion and acuity, Karakatsanis lays bare the devastating harms of mass incarceration and the bureaucracy that sustains it. He exhorts the reader to think carefully about the gap between our constitutional ideals and the lived realities of communities--and what that says about our society and ourselves." --Vanita Gupta, president and CEO, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
About the Author:
A former public defender, Alec Karakatsanis is the founder of the Civil Rights Corps, an organization designed to advocate for racial justice and bring systemic civil rights cases on behalf of impoverished people. He was named the 2016 Trial Lawyer of the Year by Public Justice and was awarded the Stephen B. Bright Award for contributions to indigent defense in the South by Gideon's Promise. He lives in Washington, DC.